Land Reform and Productivity: The Mexican Case. Analysis of Census Data.

Dovring, Folke

The report covers an investigation of the productivity of land, labor, and capital in Mexican agriculture as a means of clarifying the role played by land-reform, and more specifically its main outcome--the institution of the ejido--in the recent rapid rise of agricultural output in Mexico. The ejido is a form of communal property, although only a small minority of ejidos practice collective farming. Most of the data used in this analysis are derived from the three agricultural censuses of 1940, 1950, and 1960. The author probes the relationship of land-reform and agricultural productivity concluding that social gains stemming from land-reform are not made at the expense of economic progress. (Author/RL)